Mitchel said, that Ireland contained seven millions of people, as
brave as any upon the face of the earth. Subsequent professions of
loyalty, and assurances of his never intending to have recourse to the
bravery of those millions, were interpreted by the people as nothing
more than a clever touch of legal ability, to keep himself out of the
power of the Crown lawyers, who were ever on the watch to catch him in
his words. O'Connell himself may have never contemplated any effort
beyond legal and constitutional agitation, but the fear that he might
intend something more, founded on his bold allusions to the strength
and courage of those whom he led, gave undoubted force to the demands he
made upon the Government--in a strictly legal and constitutional manner.
When the "single-drop-of-blood" principle became the guiding star of his
political life, his demands had public opinion, and their own inherent
justice only to support them; so that physical force no longer played a
part in Irish politics, except from the fact that, inasmuch as it
undoubtedly still existed, it might some day act without him, or in
spite of him, or act when he should be dead and gone. It is hard to
think that a people who had been resisting English oppression for twenty
generations, with nothing else but physical force, ever believed him in
earnest, when he told them they should win their rights by legal and
constitutional means alone.
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